Male CEOs With Daughters Treat Women Better

By Christopher Shea

When a male CEO has a daughter, he moves to close the gender pay gap at his company, a new study finds.

Three economists drew on remarkably thorough data kept on employees in Denmark’s private sector, examining the salaries of 734,200 workers at 6,320 firms, from 1995 through 2006. The database also included information on CEOs, including the sexes and birth dates of their children.

Overall in Denmark, there is a gender wage gap of 21.5%, not adjusting for rank or hours worked, the authors said.

But the birth of a daughter to a male CEO caused that gap to close, in his company, that same year, by 0.5 percentage points. Breaking the data down further, the birth of a first daughter caused the gap to close by 0.8 percentage points. If the first daughter was also a first child, the gap closed by 2.8 percentage points (representing 13% of the gap).

Had the authors been able to adjust for hours worked and rank, where men tend to outpace women, the effects would have been even stronger, says Cristian Dezsö, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s business school and a co-author of the paper, titled “Like Daughter, Like Father: How Women’s Wages Change When CEOs Have Daughters.” The other authors are Michael S. Dahl and David Ross.

There was no detectable change in the relative wages of men and women when female CEOs had children.

Women with college degrees benefited from the births more than women with high-school or primary educations. The authors of the study speculated that this was because the CEOs imagined that this was the class their daughters would belong to.

The researchers proposed that “a switch flips” in the male CEO’s mind, making him more sensitive to gender issues.